Advances in mobile device technology and connectivity protocols provide enterprises with an opportunity to shift automated business processes to a mobile workforce. Unfortunately, the currently available techniques for accomplishing this objective are inflexible and overly reliant on persistent connectivity.
Conventional options, such as wireless web-based connectivity, data synchronization technology, and in-house developed solutions, have substantial disadvantages. Wireless web solutions often utilize a thin-client, browser-based interface that has, for the most part, proven unworkable. The wireless web model is highly connection-dependent. To work effectively, the connection between the thin-client and the network server should remain in place the entire time an application is in use by the mobile device. It is very difficult for mobile clients to remain connected or to guarantee connectivity for extended amounts of time. Mobile devices may only connect occasionally, and when they do connect, the connection may be for a very limited amount of time. As a result, existing web-based technologies based on persistent network connections provide a sub-optimal solution for extending an enterprise network to mobile devices.
The data synchronization (“data synch”) model may improve upon the wireless web-based model with respect to the non-persistent nature of mobile device connectivity. However, data synch methods often lack flexibility and usually offer very little, if any, application management capability. A typical data synch method shuttles information between handheld computers on the front-end and a corporate database on the back-end. The shuttling conventionally occurs through hard-wired data pipes referred to as data conduits, adapters or plug-ins. These conduits are difficult to create and manage because they operate in and link two very distinct environments. The first environment surrounds the mobile device and potentially includes multiple operating systems, memory footprints, and file system architectures. The second environment surrounds the enterprise back-end data sources. Each environment typically has different interface methodologies and connectivity capabilities. The conduits are hard-wired and difficult to change. As such, the entire data synch system may need to be rewritten each time new enterprise back-ends are brought on-line or members of the mobile work force choose to move to more powerful mobile devices. As such, many organizations find conventional data-synch solutions to be too inflexible to be practical.
A third conventional option, in-house development, also faces the technical disadvantage of inflexibility. The development of such systems often requires excessive amounts of in-house, custom developed software and hardware. As a result, system development projects consume considerable amounts of time, money and manpower. While these conventional systems may be impressive in their scope and level of integration, modifying their functionality can require re-writing entire blocks of code. And, if the original programmers are not available, the schedule for modifying custom code can be significantly lengthened as new programmers “back-out” the processes and flows of the original code.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved methods to support enterprises in their efforts to extend enterprise networks to mobile devices.